Profiles a class exercise that teaches the importance of developing an accurate definition of a psychological construct (guilt, control, altruism). The more precise the definition, the easier it is to choose an appropriate technique to measure that construct. Discusses the Health and Psychosocial Instrument File, a recent measurement database.…

A study examined the relationship between the way 15 faculty members like to learn and the way they like to teach, and the reasons for their teaching strategies. It also compared teachers' and their students' perceptions of their teaching. Results suggest little enthusiasm for lecturing as a teaching/learning method, but few attempts by academics…

Affirmative action is a necessary and effective strategy to end racial and gender inequalities. While moral and historical defenses of affirmative action have merit, economic reasoning is a more potent argument. Analysis of the economic costs and benefits of affirmative action in higher education illustrate its effectiveness in reducing income…

An experiment compared group oral protocols of 37 native English-speaking subjects enrolled in a fourth-semester college French course making grammaticality judgments in English and French. Results indicate the subjects do not necessarily use the same strategies in rendering grammaticality judgments in first and second languages, casting doubt on…

This study compared three levels of inclusion (special education only, integrated special education, and mainstream placements) on the cognitive and language development of 66 preschool children with disabilities. Analysis of pre- to postgains revealed that integrated special education produced gains that significantly exceeded the rate of normal…

Discusses results of a survey of LIS (library and information science) educators who specialized in reference services or online retrieval to understand how teachers have prepared students to deal with online and CD-ROM resources. Results are compared to those from earlier studies, and a copy of the survey is appended. (Author/LRW)

The patterns of cognitive play of 28 African-American and Euro-American preschool children with intellectual disabilities are reported. Fourteen children representing each group, matched on developmental age and family variables, were observed playing independently at home. The pattern of African-American children's play was more reflective of…

Used panel study of representative community sample to compare volunteer and nonvolunteer adolescents and identify effects of volunteerism on development. Found that volunteers had higher educational plans and aspirations, grade point averages, academic self-esteem, and intrinsic motivation toward school work than did nonvolunteers. Volunteerism…

Discusses the need for teachers' professional development in technology use and describes a study that examined use of the World Wide Web and email for professional development of K-12 educators. Discusses technology and society; compares the Web-based course with a traditional class; and concludes that distance learning is a viable option.…

Explores the faculty time and effort spent in developing and delivering a graduate course for both a distance course and a traditional classroom course. Results show that the distance course did require more time, but suggests hypotheses for future comparative analysis that time may partially depend on instructor experience and institutional…

Reports on a telephone survey that examined the extent of support given to multicultural education (MCE) by whites and blacks. Results from 348 respondents found strong support for the concept of MCE, but issues of implementation were more controversial with interracial differences being generally larger than intraracial differences. A model is…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

Investigated prosocial behaviors of five-year olds interacting within different learning-activity centers in a multiage preschool setting. Subjects and their younger classmates were observed for a total of 45 hours. Found significantly more proximity seeking, helping, and sharing behaviors than other kinds of prosocial behaviors in the setting.…

Explores the attrition of different aspects of Swedish grammar. Empirical data from bilingual expatriate students are compared to data from monolingual Swedish aphasic patients. The students' noun phrase morphology had undergone attrition, but not their word order. For the aphasics, word order attrition was combined with unaffected noun phrase…

An overview of college guidebooks examines their origins, development, types, impact on both consumers and colleges, and current trends and future prospects. It is argued that publishers will gain credibility by standardizing data collection and reporting formats and by no longer trying to rank colleges on criteria that change annually and fail to…